The Newest Beer on Tap ... is Wine

In 1997, Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, tried the unthinkable: He served beer at a wine dinner. The beer was Raison D'Etre, a Belgian brown brewed with raisins and complex as any Bordeaux. "But the winemakers wouldn't touch it," said Calagione.

Grape and grain have long been in a stare down, eying each other with a turbid mix of envy and egoism like rival boxers. Beer bars snicker if you order a Pinot, then serve your Flemish sour in a wine glass. It's a complicated relationship. Can't they just get along?

They used to. The first booze was rustic stuff, mixed-up concoctions of fruit, grain, and honey--any sugar folks could find, in other words. This was the only booze around; one couldn't be picky. But then Rome turned up its nose at beer, barbarians scoffed at wine, purity laws were passed, Miller commercials aired, and lines were drawn. Like snowboarding and skiing, beer's for one type of person and wine is for another. But now, a few bold brewers are speaking to both, again.

"I don't like the term hybrid," says Andy Parker, AveryBrewing's so-called barrel herder. He's also the man behind the Boulder brewery's recent wine-beer blends Muscat d'Amour and Recolte Sauvage. "People think, 'Oh, you just mixed wine and beer,' " he said. "But we didn't want grape-flavored beer--we're mixing the methods of how wine and beer are made." That means fermenting a mix of grainy wort and local grapes (Muscat Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon), then aging the beer in wine barrels. The natural, wild yeasts on the grape skins help things along. Dogfish Head's new Noble Rot uses Pinot Gris and Viognier grapes infested with botrytis cinerea (reassuringly called a "benevolent fungus") that makes the fruit extra sweet. When I asked The Bruery, one of my favorite craft breweries, if it produces any wine-y beers, marketing manager Benjamin Weiss laughed and said, "Do you prefer Syrah, Pinot, or Chardonnay?" Its Vitis series has blends of all three.

Brewing these genre-bending ales is a chore. Or "a raging pain in the ass," as Calagione puts it. Brewers don't have to worry about time constraints so much because they work with dried ingredients that keep for months. Grapes--especially those infected with fungi, benevolent or otherwise--are another story. So Calagione raced his Washington-grown grapes cross-country in a climate-controlled truck. Avery's, grown closer to home on Colorado's western slope, still had to be used within two days of picking.

But it's worth it. Even though all of these beers are barrel-aged (for about a year, on average), they taste fresh and bright. Noble Rot is tart like preserved lemon, Muscat d'Amour tastes like raspberries and cotton, the Bruery's Oui Oui brings to mind plums and Granny Smith apples, and its Trois Poules Francais is darker and peppery. At the bottom of a glass (or two), lines blur. Is it wine? Is it beer? No. Something better. --William Bostwick